Coaches Hot Seat Quotes of the Day – Monday, January 23, 2012 – William Butler Yeats

“Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought – asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”

And

“Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.”

And

“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”

And

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

And

“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.”

And

“In dreams begin responsibilities.”

And

“One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: “Hammer your thoughts into unity.” For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence.”

And

“Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;A shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itWind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”The Second Coming, 1919

And

“All women dote upon an idle manAlthough their children need a rich estate.No man has ever lived that had enoughOf children’s gratitude or woman’s love.

Test every work of intellect or faith,And everything that your own hands have wroughtAnd call those works extravagance of breathThat are not suited for such men as comeProud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.

Things said or done long years ago,Or things I did not do or sayBut thought that I might say or do,Weigh me down, and not a dayBut something is recalled,My conscience or my vanity appalled.